Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene
In the horror movie Crawl (2019), a Category 5 hurricane sweeps across Florida, sending alligators into human homes. That movie is a literal representation of the thesis behind Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth. Anxiety over ecological disaster is suggesting new topics for weird and gothic fiction, which has long overlapped with science fiction to address the cardinal post-Enlightenment fear: we humans are not the masters of our world.
As one of Dark Scenes’ essayists defines it, “three gothic master tropes—spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse—have become central to theoretical paradigms” for understanding the catastrophic reordering of the Earth’s ecosystem. Our society is haunted by history as well as unseen toxins, fictional monsters such as zombies embody our angst, and the apocalypse is no longer postponed to the far future but is happening now. Grounding the lucid collection of essays is a devastating irony: the pinnacle of human achievements through science and technology may result in our own destruction.
